YOUNGSTOWN — Judge Maureen Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court has ruled that Ohio prison inmate Chaz Bunch was not denied effective legal advice in his 2002 trial on the kidnapping and rape of a 22-year-old Youngstown State University student.

Bunch, 39, is serving a 49-year prison sentence for the crimes, which were committed Aug. 21, 2001. A co-defendant, Brandon Moore, was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Both were juveniles at the time of the offenses. Bunch comes up for parole in September 2026.

Bunch and Moore were convicted of kidnapping the victim at gunpoint as she arrived to work the midnight shift at a group home for mentally disabled women. They drove her to a dead-end street near Pyatt Street in Youngstown. There, Moore and Bunch raped her repeatedly at gunpoint.

The victim initially identified Moore and two other suspects as being participants in the crimes, but not Bunch. She later identified Bunch from a newspaper article that identified Bunch as a suspect, the ruling noted. At that point, she was “certain that he was the fourth attacker,” according to court documents.

Bunch has been the subject of much litigation in recent years, much of it dealing with him being 16 at the time he committed his crime and courts finding that he should have a meaningful opportunity for parole during his lifetime because of his age at the time of the offenses.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in December 2022 that Bunch must be granted a hearing to determine whether he was denied effective assistance of counsel. Bunch claimed he was denied effective assistance of counsel because his attorney at the time, Dennis DeMartino, failed to call an expert witness to challenge the victim’s delayed identification of Bunch as one of her rapists. Judge R. Scott Krichbaum presided over the trial, but he later recused himself from the case.

Sweeney held a hearing in September and heard from Dr. Margaret Bull Kovera, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and attorney Richard Koblentz. Kovera is an expert in eyewitness identification and Koblentz is an expert witness in ineffective assistance of counsel, according to Vindicator files.

Kovera testified there is a high degree of scientific certainty that the verdict in the case would have been different if DiMartino had called an expert Koblenz testified that while DiMartino conceded in opening statements that the case was all about the victim’s identification of Bunch, he failed to call an eyewitness identification expert, even though the court had allocated funds for expert testimony. He said the defense also failed to effectively cross-examine police witnesses in the case.

DIMARTINO

DiMartino testified in the September hearing, saying he now works as a legal assistant for another attorney. His law license was suspended indefinitely in 2016 because of several infractions of rules that govern the behavior of Ohio lawyers.

DiMartino said he did not use an expert witness during the trial because the facts of the case were working against Bunch and because he was concerned that he would “infuriate this jury to bring in an expert and say, ‘she didn’t know who did this to her.'”

DiMartino said the case involved “a brutal crime, serious crimes. To ask members of the jury not to believe that the victim’s identification was accurate, that was just a bit too much,” he said.

Another witness was local defense attorney Mark Lavelle. He testified in January that he “may have done things differently, perhaps, but I don’t know that DiMartino’s efforts fell below the prevailing standards as it relates to providing representation.”

His testimony came months after the other witnesses because in September Lavelle agreed he had not read the transcripts of some of Bunch’s 2002 trial, causing Bunch’s attorney, Joe Patituce, to question Lavelle’s ability to testify as an expert witness. The judge gave Lavelle more time to read the necessary documents.

When Lavelle testified in January, he said he would not have put an expert witness on the stand to testify the victim had erred in her identification of Bunch as one of the rapists. Instead, it would have been more effective to elicit that type of testimony in cross examination of the Youngstown police detective working on the case.

Judge Sweeney’s ruling recited the testimony of the four witnesses before concluding that “trial counsel was not ineffective when he chose not to call an eyewitness identification expert at trial.”

NEWS RELEASE

Mahoning County Prosecutor Gina DeGenova issued a press release Friday noting that Ralph Rivera, chief of the criminal division of the prosecutor’s office, and Assistant Prosecutor Ed Czopur represented the State of Ohio in the matter.

The press release stated that Sweeney’s ruling “effectively denied (Bunch’s) request for a new trial.”

Rivera explained that later Friday by saying that if Sweeney would have found Bunch’s legal representation to be ineffective, “the remedy is a new trial.” So when the judge found that Bunch’s representative was effective, “in reality, it denies the request for a new trial.”

The news release also contained a quote that may have been misleading. It quoted from a ruling related to Bunch’s co-defendant, Brandon Moore, but the release referenced both Moore and Bunch in saying that they “embarked on a criminal rampage of escalating depravity on the evening of Aug. 21, 2001, in Youngstown.”

The ruling actually stated that “Moore embarked on a criminal rampage of escalating depravity on the evening of Aug. 21, 2001, in Youngstown.”

Rivera clarified that the ruling was referring only to Moore in that Moore robbed a man and woman earlier that evening, before Moore and Bunch committed the rapes and kidnapping.

The Moore ruling continued by saying “Later that night, around 10:20,” Moore ran toward the victim of the rapes and pointed a gun at her, demanded her money, then ordered her into the passenger seat of her car.

A short time later, Bunch emerged from a car nearby and got into the car with Moore and the victim. A short time later, Moore and Bunch raped the woman.

Rivera said prosecutors always believed that Bunch was in the car with Moore during the robbery of the man and woman and that Bunch was charged in the robbery of the man and woman, but he was not convicted of it at trial.

Nonetheless, Rivera said he thinks the quote in the ruling to a “rampage of escalating depravity” also accurately described the terror of what the rape victim experienced: “It starts out as a robbery and kidnapping and escalates into the rape.”

DeGenova is on the ballot March 19 as the sole candidate for the Democratic nomination as Mahoning County Prosecutor. Attorney Lynn Maro is on the ballot as the sole candidate for the Republican nomination.